Better when He's Bold (Welcome to the Point #2)(65)
Colorful tattoos started at his collarbone and wound and twisted all the way down his massive arms and across the backs of his hands. I didn’t get the theme behind all of the designs and characters, but it was all very bright and detailed and totally belied the fact that Stark was a mellow, mild-mannered guy who played around on the Internet for a living. He really looked like as much of a thug and a criminal as Bax did.
“Hey, man. Thanks for taking a look at this for me.”
I handed the laptop off and followed him into the darkened town house. There were electronics and wires, as well as monitors and a variety of TVs everywhere. It resembled what I figured a command center of a spaceship had to look like. I accepted the beer he offered and took a seat in a giant leather recliner that was placed in front of a TV that was the size of a movie-theater screen.
Stark sat on the couch and started poking at keys on the computer.
“What exactly am I looking for in here if the hard drive is shot?”
I shrugged. “Anything that doesn’t belong there. My girl has a stalker, and whoever is fixated on her is messing with her life. They made a fake e-mail, a fake Facebook, and even a fake phone number, all pretending to be her. Whoever it is has managed to get pretty deep inside her life already.”
He looked at me over the top of the computer. “You got a girl?”
“Why does everybody keep saying that?”
He snickered at me. “I’ve known you a long time, Race. I remember the way you ran through girls before you fell in with Bax and started screwing around with cars instead of cheerleaders.”
I slumped in the recliner and scowled. “I guess when I found out I had a little sister and that she had been living in squalor, was fighting to survive every single day, it made me have a new insight into the chicks I was wasting time on.”
Not that I had lived like a saint at any point in my life, but from the second I met Dovie, took her under my wing, I made sure that any girl I hooked up with, messed around with, knew the score. I was in it for one thing and one thing only and they had to be okay with that. That was one of the major reasons I knew Brysen was different from the get-go. She hadn’t bought into my charm, into my practiced flirtation, and that alone made me want to get to her. But it was the fact that even with her feigned dislike of me, I knew, just simply knew, that I wanted her for way more than just sex. I wanted those sky-blue eyes to look at me like I was her hero, I wanted her to smile at me because I made her happy, and I wanted all that pretty, pale skin to get pink and warm because I turned her on and she wanted me just as much as I wanted her.
“How is Dovie?” More rapid tapping on the keys followed by a noise and his eyebrows dipping under the rim of his glasses.
“Good. She has a job she loves and makes pretty good money doing it. She’s going to school to get a degree, and despite everything I thought I knew about her and Bax, they seem to be a perfect couple. They’re making it work. She’s happy, she makes him happy—well, a Bax version of happy—and I guess that’s all I can ask for as a friend and a brother.”
He shook his head and laughed a little. “You getting serious about a girl is surprising, Bax settling down is downright unbelievable. I thought for sure he would be in prison for the rest of his life by now, not playing house.”
I replied easily, “He’s a lucky guy and I think he has more than nine lives.”
Stark muttered his agreement and then looked up at me with a frown.
“There is all kinds of trick software loaded on this computer, Race. The hard drive ate a bunch of it when it went down, but there are traces of it all over the place.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s key-tracking software on here, there’s code written in here that allows someone to remotely view whatever the front camera is looking at. There’s mirroring software on here so that whatever she was looking at on her monitor was being projected onto the other user’s computer. Whenever she used this computer every single thing she did was being tracked. This is a wide-open doorway into your lady’s life.”
All I could do was stare at him stupidly. How had I missed all of that when I went digging in there for her school stuff?
“You’ve got to be kidding me?”
“No way. If anyone tried to track where all the stuff that was sent out from the fake her was coming from, it would point back to this computer and her IP address. Who is close enough to her that they could install all of this on here without her knowing it or questioning it? Programs like this take up a lot of space, and take forever to install. She would’ve had to hand over her computer willingly for them to download this stuff.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Me either. This is some serious Big-Brother-eyes-everywhere-shit on here. I haven’t seen anything like this outside of military or government use. This is one obsessed freak you are dealing with.”
I wanted to grab the laptop and smash it into a million and one pieces, but more than that, I wanted to find whoever was behind terrorizing and violating Brysen and choke the life out them with my bare hands. Once I found out who it was, a tire iron and some broken kneecaps would look like child’s play.
“Is there any way for you to backtrack to the other computer?”
“If the hard drive wasn’t a wasteland I probably could. She’s lucky this thing is old and crapped out on her. There’s no telling how long all of that software was running in the background.”